How to Reduce Staff Turnover in Your Restaurant

Hiring at your restaurant may sometimes feel a chaotic line change during an ice hockey game—players darting across the ice, some rushing off while others hastily join the fray. In this high-speed exchange, a coach can only hope that the newcomers integrate smoothly into the ongoing chaos. However, unlike in sports, a restaurant can face a significant toll with every new “player” introduced to the team.

Constant employee rotation and turnover can come at a high cost. The National Restaurant Association estimates that restaurants spend nearly $6,000 on average to replace a single hourly employee a year in staff turnover. When you consider that the average restaurant’s profit margin hovers precariously around five percent, it’s easy to see how a reduction in turnover can make a big difference in your bottom line.

Your food could be amazing, but if you don’t have the staff to serve it, your opportunities for growth are severely limited. Fortunately, with a little forethought and creativity, you can make some changes that might help reduce turnover in your restaurant.

1. Create Excellent Onboarding Materials

Two things that frustrate new employees are discovering a job wasn’t the same as advertised and being confused about what to do when starting a new job. Both of these scenarios can lead to a type of buyer’s remorse and quickly leave a new hire considering where to go next.

Don’t be that employer. By putting in some work up-front to create a great onboarding program, you can reap benefits for years. Your onboarding process should be clear and detailed without being overwhelming, and it should provide an employee with written materials to answer their questions as well as “permission” to ask others for clarification. You can complement your in-house training with technique videos from ESource, Escoffier Global’s learning platform that provides an array of skills videos for culinary industry employees.

Shorter training times can save money, and good communication can go a long way toward creating a workplace people want to remain with. 

2. Better Hiring Helps Prevent Later Turnover

Perhaps the best way to ensure your staffing investments pay off over time is to pick the right candidate at the right moment. Easier said than done, right?

Hiring isn’t just about wages, scheduling, and experience. You must also be on the lookout for the intangibles: Is a candidate eager and willing to learn everything about the business? Is an applicant a joy to be around, one who embodies the identity of your brand? Does a new hire share your company values and fit into your existing culture?

You can fast-track past those who don’t fit in with your company culture by drafting a job posting that makes it clear who your ideal employee is and exactly what their responsibilities will be. Then, you can post your ad to a quality job board from Escoffier Global, where highly trained and educated candidates can head for their job search.

3. Show Employees How They Can Be Promoted

Positions in the service industry often come with distinct compensation structures: front-of-house roles typically rely on lower wages supplemented by tips, whereas back-of-house staff usually receive fixed wages with potential incentives. Many employees enter these positions with aspirations of role advancement from the outset. To proactively address this, demonstrating the potential for career growth from the very beginning can be beneficial.

You might start things rolling with your job listing, which could include phrases like “opportunities for career advancement” or the like. Then, you can give new hires an employee handbook that explicitly describes the various roles in your restaurant and how to progress from one to another.

Your strategy should also demonstrate how employees might move laterally into other types of roles in addition to vertically into management and even partnership positions, if possible. By illustrating a clear and promising career trajectory to your employees, not only a vision of their immediate role, you can help decrease turnover. 

4. Offer Skills Training and Education

You made sure to write a standout job listing, trained your new hire well, and showed them how to connect the dots between their present position and a promotion. Next, you can offer them a means to improve upon their skills that can be more efficient than time spent on the job.

Your employees can continue developing their skills via a program like ESource, which offers everything from technique videos to courses. These are valuable for on-demand training of practical skills your employees need but that you might not have time to teach.

And for employees who want to do even more, you might consider Work & Learn, a flexible program that offers a scholarship for employees’ culinary education through online classes offered at Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts—an Escoffier Global partner.

5. Create a Bonus Program

Getting great staff in the door is one thing; retaining them is another.

Even competitive wages or salary, flexible scheduling, and perhaps a benefits package may not be enough to satisfy your top-performing employees. Incentivizing them based on results, customer commendations and co-worker interactions can elevate staff members to new levels of productivity as they earn small bonuses, gift cards, free meals, an extra day off, or access to local events.

You might even introduce an element of gamification, in which employees are encouraged to meet certain benchmarks and goals or beat previous statistics. This might look like a server being encouraged to upsell more top-shelf drinks or add-on desserts, or kitchen staff becoming just a little bit faster in delivering orders or getting their prep work done.

You can design your rewards program however you see fit; just make sure it’s fair and fully explained to all employees.

6. Welcome Employee Feedback

Whether it’s through exit interviews, anonymous surveys, or monthly 1-to-1s with staff, you need an open line of communication into workplace satisfaction that can help you to determine what can be done better in the future.

Getting comprehensive insight into the day-to-day sentiment of all staff allows you to check the pulse of those who may be on the way out the door. Then, you can have a conversation as to how things should change for the betterment of all parties.

Reduced Turnover Benefits Everyone

A reduction in staff turnover helps your restaurant improve its bottom line and it creates a more positive environment for your staff. 

You can focus on tangible ways to keep employees around longer by evaluating your hiring, training, and retention practices. Whether you need to make wholesale changes or just tweak a few areas, Auguste Escoffier Global Solutions can help.

Escoffier Global offers customized training to help you retain and develop your current employees and scholarships for qualified employees who want to pursue a culinary diploma or degree. Get in touch with our team for more information on partnering with us and building your culinary talent pipeline.